I want to use a portable device as “virtual notebook” with integrated picture taking and annotations

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I am currently working as a consultant for a company in the tourism/travel/leisure sector. Sometimes I have to sit to the side of one of their users and ask them to work through the steps they have to follow while using a legacy system (partially exposed via web, partially via character interface).

I noticed that what I tend to do is to take notes on a notepad, and supplement these with screenshots I ask the user to take, or just shoot with my iPhone.

Considering I also have an Android tablet which so far I haven't found much use for, I was wondering if there is an app (either iOS or Android) that could allow me to take notes (typed via keyboard), interspersed with pictures taken with the device camera, and annotated with freehand writings, doodles, drawings, all as a single document (a sort of vertically infinite scrolling sheet) and finally export it to some sane document format to postprocess on a desktop.

Evernote lets you take notes and insert drawings, photographs and audio clips. The best part is it will synchronize between all your devices, so your notes will appear on your phone, tablet, laptop and desktop. The software is available for Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows, Mac, and your notes can also be accessed through their website.

The basic service is free, but if you have a lot of notes, want to use multiple online notebooks or need to sync a lot of data, you might consider getting a premium account, which costs $45 per year (if you're using it primarily for work, this is probably a tax-deductible expense).

Or try using Microsoft OneNote, which is also available on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows, Mac and can also make your stuff accessible through a browser interface. OneNote offers multiple online notebooks for free and it also connects to IFTTT, Feedly and many other apps — see http://www.onenote.com/apps. It will OCR handwritten text like the notes you take on your photos. It will search text in saved data (even text in photos). Onenote can be downloaded for free at http://www.onenote.com/

OneNote will do exactly what you are talking about above. As for exports – I know it exports to PDF, and if you have the right software you can edit the PDF or save the PDF into Word for further work. You can also copy and paste OneNote notebook text into a Word document.

The Windows versions of OneNote (even the free ones) have an additional neat feature: you can record a meeting on your tablet and type notes during the meeting. Afterward, you can review your notes, and when you tap a note you can jump to that part of the recording.

Microsoft is clearly putting a lot of effort into OneNote and it’s likely they will roll out more features in 2015.

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